Threatened Mon River bridges admirered

A few people who attended the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh last weekend admire the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge, a closed span that is under threat of demolition. Meanwhile, major improvements to Locks and Dam No. Four continue in the distance.

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA, Pa. – The aging Donora-Webster Bridge appears to be in better shape than many spans its age in the United States, a group of bridge experts agrees.

“This bridge has a coat of paint on it,” said Luke Gordon, a construction inspector from Michigan who visited the historic span Saturday with other bridge enthusiasts. “It’s 10-times better than most I’ve seen.”

Organizers of the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh included weekend stops in southwestern Pennsylvania at the Donora-Webster Bridge and the similarly built, nearby 103-year-old Charleroi-Monessen Bridge because both of their futures are uncertain.

Outside of Allegheny County, the bridges are among just four Pennsylvania through-truss, pin connected spans still standing along the Monongahela River. The others are in Point Marion and Brownsville, and all are on the National Register of Historic Places because they were pinned together using technology borrowed from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But, within a year the Charleroi-Monessen could be demolished. A new bridge would then be built on the same site if the plan clears the scrutiny of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The Point Marion Bridge will be gone, too, after a new replacement span opens in November.

“Bridge heritage is at risk,” said Eric DeLony of Santa Fe, a retired chief engineer for the National Park Service who also attended the bridge conference.

He was among a dozen such experts attending the conference who toured the 101-year-old Donora-Webster Bridge. Some took photographs, while others said they admired its graceful lines.

The span became the first toll free bridge to open on the Mon, allowing the older community of Webster to share in the new wealth of Donora after a sprawling steel mill opened within its borders. The bridge was originally painted black for the coal in Webster’s hills and gray for the smoke that billowed from the mills.

The bridge also stood alongside the infamous Donora zinc works, which contributed to a 1948 smog that killed at least 20 local residents and became the catalyst for America’s first clean air laws.

“Donora, probably more than any other town, has the history as to why people would want to come see this bridge,” said Todd Wilson, a civil engineering consultant from Pittsburgh who helped to organize the conference. “This bridge was here and it did play its part in that story.”

It appears the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has done a good job maintaining this bridge. It’s guard rails were not attached its main vertical beams to protect the superstructure from damage by vehicle accidents, Gordon said.

However, there is speculation PennDOT will begin scrutinizing this bridge after it completes the historical review process on the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge that has been closed to traffic since February. The closure of that span followed an inspection that discovered a badly deteriorated pin joint supporting a deck.

People in the struggling Mon Valley towns need to band together to save these historic spans if there is any hope for the area to become a historic tourism destination, said Nikki Sheppick, a historian in Charleroi.

“If we don’t keep these assets, we’re dead,” Sheppick said during the conference stop in Charleroi.

Another mill folds

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 13

By Scott Beveridge

Dad saw wicked times in 1972.

Jim Beveridge was fast approaching 50 and sweating the withdrawal from nicotine while kicking his long habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Worse yet, he had sworn off the Iron City beer after his physician warned him about his shrinking liver. This was a man who couldn’t stray five miles from our home in Webster, Pa., to pay a bill or pick up groceries without twice stopping at a bar. He spent more than a few long nights pacing the floors.

And then came the announcement from the steel mill in nearby Monessen, where he had worked since before World War II: The plant was shutting down for good on Feb. 17 of that year.

Our lives spiraled out of control, almost in an instant.

The Page Division of American Chain and Cable Co. furloughed its 250 workers because the 72-year-old factory was no longer profitable. Sure, there had been times when work was slow, and others when the union halted production during stalled negotiations. But this mill had woven wire to hold up the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge that opened in 1937 in San Francisco. There would always be a demand for Page’s products, the workers assumed, even though their numbers had dwindled from a record high of 1,100 in 1940.

J. Wallace Page of Adrian, Mich., constructed his blooming, rod and wire mills in Monessen in 1899. He was considered to be the “father of the wire-fence industry” in the United States, having developed the technique of hand weaving wire at his home. In no time, his Monessen operation was producing 3,000 tons of steel a month. Twenty years later, Page’s operation would be absorbed into the holdings of American Chain and Cable of New York.

But by January 1972 the demand had weakened for wire and fence to the point that members of United Steelworkers Local 1391 in Monessen took concessions to keep their factory churning. The agreement paved way for the company to reduce the workforce from 300 to 150. With his seniority, my father initially doubted he would lose his job as a pipefitter and union position of grievance man. Then the national union called a company-wide strike on Jan. 31, and within two weeks, the Monessen mill was history.

The five-minute announcement from the company was a shock and surprise to the workers. “It’s a black day for us at Page,” local union President Elliot Bianchi told the local newspaper. “I’m sick to the stomach,” he stated in an article in The Valley-Independent.

Knowing his medical benefits would soon dry up, dad encouraged mom to check herself into Charleroi-Monessen Hospital to have a tumor removed in what proved to be a false cancer scare. She was on the second floor while dad’s mother was on the fourth, entering the throes of dementia.

While our hardships seemed unique to our family of five, they would prove to be just the beginning of what was about to happen to thousands of dependents of Pittsburgh-area steelworkers in a collapsing industry. Being the first to receive pink slips, the Page employees weren’t offered extended unemployment paychecks and free retraining as were the masses who would join the ranks of the unemployed in America’s rust belt by the mid 1980s.

With two sons about to enter college, dad took a low-paying job as a Pinkerton guard until something better came along. In the fall of 1974, I was off to Edinboro College near Erie, Pa., to study art on a free ride with government grants because my parents’ earnings fell below poverty guidelines. In my mind, I was forever turning my back on the Godforsaken Mon Valley.

Ironically, one the first things I did after finishing my degree was to apply for a job at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. in Monessen.

THE END



Introduction

(Captions: An early postcard view of the Page wire mill in Monessen, top, and a photo taken by John Hurrianko in the 1960s of Webster from the ramp to the Donora-Webster Bridge. The images are courtesy of the Greater Monessen Historical Society)

Bringing the dead to life

The city of Monessen would be dead without its zombies. Its creatures are living students, however, who are learning how to apply gory makeup and mold together robotic aliens in the style of low-budget creep movies. They study at Douglas Education Center, which was a near-extinct business school before sci-fi film icon Tom Savini joined its faculty. The award-winning special effects makeup artist from Pittsburgh attracts hundreds of students from across the United States to his school in the small city in Westmoreland County, Pa., whose economy has suffered greatly since Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. permanently idled a steel mill there in the 1980s. Today, the Douglas school is the largest employer in Monessen where goth students have replaced blue-collar workers on the sidewalks. Over the past week, they have been filming a cheap movie about the walking dead on the crusty Donora-Webster Bridge for a class project. Heads were turning in more ways than one when characters like Mike Meeker of Ohio, shown above, showed up on the set.